The world's getting better despite what you think

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You’ve heard the fairytale about the goose that laid the golden eggs. Like most fairytales, there are many versions of the story. In Aesop’s telling, the “Countryman” who owns the goose grows rich as he sells one egg each day. But over time he grows impatient and cuts the goose open, hoping to find a lode of golden eggs. Of course he doesn’t, and he is much the poorer for it.

The story’s message is as true today as it was in ancient times. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the two most dynamic candidates were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Sanders decried the 1% who pulled the strings, got rich, and made life bad for everyone else. It was us against the 1%. On the right thundered Donald Trump, who promised to Make America Great Again by promising to get tough on immigration, raising trade barriers, and strengthening the military. There is a goose and she lays golden eggs, but the 1% (in Sander’s version) or immigrants and foreign countries (in Trump’s version) steal them.

Everybody else running for president were hopelessly vanilla. In comparison to Sanders and Trump, they seemed to stand for the status quo, which of course is always bad. In Sanders/Trump golden egg speak, the status quo equals someone else getting America’s eggs.

Is the status quo bad? Yes, in certain ways. Opioid addiction and the deaths it causes are status quo, as is worsening income inequality. But by most measures, these are very good times. The status quo isn’t so bad. At the end of the Obama Administration, unemployment was 4.6%, which is half a point below what the Federal Reserve calls full employment. The stock market went through a healthy expansion from 2008-1016, and has done even better during the Trump Administration. Crime rates are near all-time lows, and high school graduation rates are the highest ever, at 82%. Teens are smoking less and having less sex. If that’s the status quo, that’s not so bad. It sounds like there are a quite a few golden eggs, but we don’t seem to notice them in our midst.

Despite many strong fundamentals, the voters elected the man least happy with the status quo. Since his election, he has shown an authoritarian streak, firing James Comey and attacking the press and dozens of individuals. Despite complaining about Obama’s executive orders, Trump signed nearly twice as many as his predecessor in the first 200 days. The President routinely badmouths agencies, like the Justice Department and the FBI, that are the backbone of the rule of law.

Trump is the Countryman in Aesop’s fable. Impatient as the goose’s owner, Trump lurches from one policy whim to the next. He may just take the axe to the system. He may take an axe to the goose. And what is the goose? Liberalism.

By this I mean the liberalism you learned about in high school government class: individual rights, rule of law, democracy, free markets. The stuff we’ve been breathing since the 1700s. John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Adam Smith. But it’s like air. It’s there. We need it. But we don’t think about it much…

…until, I hope, it is threatened. And it is threatened right now. The voters who are energized, on both the right and the left, don’t think liberalism is working. Sanders and Trump—and even Hillary Clinton—were against the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, the kind of free trade policy the US used to champion. One reason the stock market is so high and unemployment and inflation are so low is because of, not despite, global trade. The only major drop in the stock indices during the Trump Administration have come after he slapped tariffs on Chinese goods. If we keep the new Trump tariff regime, other countries will retaliate. Goods will get more expensive and unemployment will rise as trade and commerce slow.

The past 30 years have been very good for the world, despite the bad news. And the number one driver of the good has been liberalism. But the liberal order is vanilla. It’s the air we breathe. It’s the stuff that sustains us but we don’t see how it sustains us. And liberalism is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Some liberals want to radically change the Constitution. Some conservatives are willing to suspend elections to stay in power. Faith in the goose—democracy, capitalism, rule of law, and institutions—is eroding. The axe is sharpened.

I’m happy to see that there’s a backlash against the pessimism. I encourage you to read Gregg Easterbrook’s It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear; Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress; and Hans, Ola, and Anna Rosling’s. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Very recent books like Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West and Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism take a closer look at the theme of this article. Both Goldberg and Luce recount the fable of the goose and the golden eggs because it is an apt metaphor for our current peril. We live in the richest, safest, and most democratic time in history, yet we are very close to ending it in a fit of pique. Let us turn our gaze away from the goose and focus on the real problems of our age, including climate change, inequality, global poverty, and the recent rise in authoritarianism. Spare the goose…and save civilization.

For most of American history, there was a strong belief that our children were going to do better than we did. The story goes something like this: My grandparents were immigrants, and my father was a soldier in World War II. My dad was the first of his family to go to college. My sisters and I went to college. With each generation our horizons broaden and we earn more money.

But sometime in the late 20th century, this assurance that the next generation would do better started to disintegrate. Ronald Reagan was elected to make America great again, though he found John Winthrop’s shining “City Upon a hill” to be more inspiring than #MAGA. But by Reagan’s presidency, most Americans did not believe that their children would do better than they did.

I understand why the “my-kids-should-do-better-than-I” metric is a popular one. We all have stories of bootstrappers in our families. But I think this “better-than-I” metric is very problematic in the 21st Century.

A brief history of the last 400 years is in order. The Europeans (and later Africans and Asians) who colonized what’s now the US wiped out most of the natives and leveraged the bounty of the continent. The colonies that became the United States was able to avoid European wars and grow grow grow during the 1800s, in part thanks to the slave labor of Africans. While the two world wars of the early 20th century took a terrible toll on America, the toll in Europe and East Asia was much much much worse.

The US was able to grow on after the backs of Indians and Africans while it was protected from Europe’s frequent paroxysms of blood. In short, the white folks who pulled the strings in the US were very lucky. While our country grew through the luck and pluck of hardscrabble Americans, it also grew at the expense of others.

Part of the reason Americans find it harder to continue “my-kids-should-do-better-than-I” growth is that the world is much more fair. This fairness is very much a product of the expansion of America’s values of freedom, free trade, and equality (not that we always lived up to those ideals). After winning World War II and the Cold War, American (and European classical liberal) ideas predominated. China and other countries are now giving us a run for our money, (mostly) playing by the rules of capitalism, and we resent it.

This seems a little rich. China was savaged by civil war, famine, civil war, Japan, civil war, and Mao. They are trying to achieve their dreams just like Americans did in the 1800s and much of the 20th century. So it’s not surprising that while only 6% of Americans think the future will be better, a whopping 41% of Chinese are optimistic about their future. I think they’re experiencing the growth we experienced in our past. As a mature economy, we won’t grow like this. Sometime, probably soon, Chinese growth rates will decrease to levels resembling ours, just as they did in Japan in the late 20th century.

So are we doomed to a sad future?

No, because we’re measuring progress the wrong way.

Gross domestic product has been a favorite measure of economists and policy makers ever since Simon Kuznets did his groundbreaking work on national accounts in the 1930s. GDP grew explosively for much of America’s history. As a measure, it remains popular, but alternatives are starting to challenge it. The tiny Himalayan kingdom Bhutan famously made “Gross National Happiness” a goal of national policies. In the West, scholars are expanding national accounts of well-being, notably the European Commission and the Global Happiness Council.

I like GDP a lot, but I don’t think it works well for highly developed countries like the US. It works well for poor and middle income countries because GDP correlates with well-being. Life-expectancy, infant mortality, and other important measures improve lock step with GDP growth, especially in developing countries.

For the last 30 years, GDP growth in the US has been between one and four percent most years, far below the nine percent average in China. So is life there three times better than in the US? Of course not. China is undemocratic and citizens have few civil liberties, even as their living standards have improved. Our relatively sluggish GDP growth doesn’t reflect the fact that millions of LGBT Americans can marry, or that life expectancy keeps rising, or that the human genome was sequenced, or that international telephone calls are now free. (Remember long distance bills?)

To get a full sense of how inadequate economic growth is as a measure of life quality in a mature economy like ours, I will quickly reel off 26 aspects of life that keep improving regardless of GDP:

Lower crime rates, less air pollution, more forest coverage, more parks, better schools, rising IQ scores, better dental health, more cancer cures, less invasive surgery, fewer civil wars, fewer interstate wars, longer life, lower child mortality rates, less drug use by teens, less sex by teens, limitless free information via the internet, better weather prediction, lower rates of injury and death from natural disasters, low inflation, more gender equality, more rights for LGBTs, inexpensive food, safer cars, safer workplace conditions, higher high school graduation rates, and higher college attendance rates. I could go on. These are just ones that came to mind. Life keeps getting better in countless small ways that are not captured by economic growth (i.e., GDP growth).

So America, and the rest of the world, is getting better at an increasing speed. Politics are ugly. So is the news. But politics and the news are not proxies for the state of the world.

I’ll close with words spoken by Bobby Kennedy fifty years ago:

The Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and … the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl… Yet [it] does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play… the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages… it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Are you smarter than a chimp? Hans Rosling has been asking this question for many years. He’s found that most people aren’t.

Rosling quizzes people about the state of the world, asking questions about topics like extreme poverty, education attainment by girls, and deaths by natural disasters. He then compares human responses to those a chimp would generate if answers were written on bananas and the chimp chose at random. Nearly everyone quizzed by Rosling does worse than our simian cousins.

Why? Because we have an out-of-date worldview. We think most girls in developing countries become child brides. We think natural disasters are getting deadlier when they’re really killing fewer people. We think poverty’s never been more widespread when in actuality rates are at their lowest ever.

One advantage chimps have is they don’t watch the news, which is full of images that feature humanity at our worst. People see these pictures and unconsciously think that the news is a proxy for the state of the world, when really it reflects our ability to film everything that goes wrong (due in part to the billions of pocket video recorders we carry thanks to human technological progress).

Our survival psychology also plays a role. We pay attention to, think about, and remember things that are frightening, gory, and tragic. This is our negativity bias. It kept us focused on threats in our ancient past, but today it still pulls the strings despite the safety of the modern world.

What is the state of the world? And what should we pay attention to?

In a new book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World, Rosling,* co-authoring with his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna, uses humor, statistics, and stories from personal experience to show us a different way to see the world. First, the authors make a compelling case that the present is the best time ever. They tell stories about the poverty in Sweden that was widespread just a few generations ago. The speed of progress has accelerated in the rich world and spread to the poor countries, but most people still think the developing world is the same place they learned about back in grade school.

The authors also direct us to turn our attention away from the smoke and toward the fire. Since 9/11, terrorism has been the obsession of policymakers here in the United States. Even though its impact is tiny (though still tragic) when compared to the flu, gun violence, auto accidents, opioid addiction, and dozens of other problems, terrorism gets pushed to the top of the public agenda by a frightened populace and the political class. The Roslings argue that we should focus on five problems that dwarf terrorism, yet get too little attention: global pandemics, financial collapse, world war, extreme poverty, and global warming.

Three of these problems–global pandemic, financial collapse, and world war–have happened before. We know how catastrophic they will be if they return. Two other problems are happening in slow motion: extreme poverty and climate change. The good news about extreme poverty is that it has been going down. The bad news is that extreme poverty is the handmaiden of terrorism and war. Places that serve as safe havens for terrorism–Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Palestine–are also havens of poverty. If we want to suck the oxygen out of the terrorism ecosystem, we should end global poverty. This will likely happen but it needs to be hurried along. Look at rich countries. They once had terrorism, fueled in part by the Cold War. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, European terrorist organizations like ETA and the IRA have laid down their arms. Barring renegade individuals, rich countries no longer harbor terror. If we end poverty we will likely suffocate terrorism too.

Unlike poverty, global warming is getting worse. The political will to combat the production of greenhouse gasses is getting stronger, but, barring the participation of the US, turning the corner will be tough. But we have reason to hope. The two other global atmospheric challenges that threatened us–the ozone hole and acid rain–were solved by international cooperation. The United States took a lead on these and the world overcame this catastrophic environmental challenges. Currently the US is not leading the charge against global warming, which means progress is in doubt.

So I encourage you read Factfulness, and check out Rosling’s TED Talks. They are hilarious, insightful, and an optimistic balm in a pessimistic world.

*Hans Rosling died of pancreatic cancer last year, so his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna continue his work at Gapminder.

–Are global famines right around the corner, as Paul Erhlich and other eco-pessimists predict?
–Are we all going to be fat blobs by the year 2100?
–Or will we finally going to get fit, live long, and prosper?

Well, we certainly know the past. Most people lived lives of food insecurity. Hunter-gatherers were subject to the whims of mother nature. Later on, the first farmers survived one locust (or human) invasion away from starvation. Until the Green Revolution of the 20th century, a Malthusian future appeared to be our destiny.

But instead of starvation, we got the opposite: fast food, sugary sweets, and a glut of carbohydrates. Today, obese people outnumber starving people. This seems an ironic twist in the human story. We lived on the edge of starvation for most of our history. Now we’re all going to die of heart disease and metabolic disorder.

Except we aren’t.

Medical progress has meant heart disease rates in rich countries have been cut in half by cholesterol medicines and improved medical procedures. For those who do have heart attacks, medical breakthroughs have sent survival rates higher and higher.

But too many of us are still too fat. What’s going to happen?

Here in the States, we have a saying that most trends start in California. I suggest a more global statement: Most trends start with the rich. A century ago only rich people had cars, and now billions drive. Air conditioning was first installed in the mansions of the wealthy. Today even the poor in rich countries have air conditioning, and it’s becoming commonplace in middle and low income countries. Today the global rich go to the gym, sweat through Zumba or Barre classes, and eat lots of vegetables. Tomorrow everybody will be in the gym and eating vegetables.

I’m pretty confident. Why?

Because eventually, most everybody gets everything. When smartphones first came out, only the rich had them. Now farmers in poor countries use smartphones to get information about the weather and crop prices. TVs were once curiosities in the homes of the wealthy. Now people in favelas, barrios, and slums around the world watch TV.

If you think my argument’s dubious, just do a quick historical review of all the curiosities that the rich bought first and everyone else wanted. If the technology had legs–think transistor radios, TV, smartphones…not Segways and Furbies–then eventually these popular products were made and marketed for the masses.

But eating less and exercising more is a behavior, not a product.

Smoking provides the best example of the pattern I describe. Lots of people smoked a generation ago. As laws and customs in wealthy countries become more smoker unfriendly, the culture started to shift. Who were the first adopters of a new smoke-free lifestyle? The rich and highly educated. Income and education attainment have a strong reverse correlation with smoking. So as more and more people get better educated and earn more, they will smoke less. Similarly, as education and income go up, obesity goes down. The same process that gets people to eat less and exercise more is the one that got folks to smoke less.

So I’m not a health economist, but I’m going to say this anyway: Humans go through three stages: Famished, Fat, and Fit. For 99% of history most of us have been living one really bad day (or event) away from famine. For the last couple generations, folks in rich countries have been getting fat. Most recently, the rich and middle classes of rich countries have been eating more vegetables and exercising (just like they stopped smoking 30 years ago). The income and education escalator will bring the rest of the world up to the Fit stage someday, and probably sooner than we think. It took less than 10 years for the iPhone to go from plaything of the rich to global ubiquity. Invest in gym memberships and health food!

“Worse” say most Trump voters in a recent Pew Research Center Survey. Eighty-one percent said as much (above). Only 19 percent of Clinton voters said that.

Trump’s biggest supporters were white men, nearly two-thirds of whom voted for him. Life for white men may have felt better because they had privileged access to higher education, social stature, political office, and good employment. These good things in life were limited for everyone else.

Here are some of the many ways that life is better in the US than it was 50 years ago:

Communications: Remember that thing called long-distance? You can call anywhere for free now. And communicate in most any way, to anyone, anywhere. For free.

Economy: Despite much fear, the economy is flying high. Unemployment is low, the stock market is high, home ownership is not far from its all-time high. The middle class is smaller than it used to be, but this is mostly due to growth in the high income category.

Environment: 1966, nestled between Silent Spring and The Population Bomb, is about the time when the modern green movement took shape. The The Cuyahoga River was once the most polluted river in the United States, made famous because it caught fire in the 60s…that is, the 1860s. Over the next century it would catch fire at least 12 more times, leading to the infamous 1969 fire that launched the environmental movement. People think pollution is a new thing, but pollution was much worse in the 1800s and most of the 1900s when there were few environmental regulations. Today, across America, air and water quality are better than they were in 1966.

Food: Suffice it to say that food is so cheap and abundant that obesity, not starvation, is the bigger health threat. There’s no strong proof that legal pesticides or GMOs cause health problems. You can even get fruit in winter shipped from across the planet. People may complain about “food miles,” but maybe they should complain about “clothing miles” or “natural resource miles.” Just about everything is from everywhere else, and we seem to be doing all this trade with less and less pollution.

Transport: It’s easier, safer, and cheaper. The chart below shows how many commercial airplanes crashed around the world each year. The decrease in crashes is more than threefold, even though air travel has increased a great deal.Looking globally, the improvements are much greater. Here’s a comparison of then and now, from yourlifeinnumbers.org.

In 1966, average life expectancy was only 56 years. Today it’s 72. That’s an increase of 29 percent.

Out of every 1,000 infants born, 113 died before their first birthday. Today, only 32 die. That’s a reduction of 72 percent.

Median income per person rose from around $6,000 to around $16,000, or by 167 percent – and that’s adjusted for inflation and purchasing power.

The food supply rose from about 2,300 calories per person per day to over 2,800 calories, an increase of 22 percent, thus reducing hunger.

The length of schooling that a person could typically expect to receive was 3.9 years. Today, it’s 8.4 years – a 115 percent increase.

The world has become less authoritarian, with the level of democracy rising from -0.97 to 4.23 on a scale from -10 to 10. That’s an improvement of 536 percent.

Here and overseas, life is much better. It may feel worse, but that’s probably just your rosy retrospection calling the tune. We tend to think the past is better, especially as we get older and memories are recast in a glowing light. But it’s not, and making major political, economic, governmental, and social decisions based on false assumptions might just undo the progress we’ve made.

Like 1968, 2016 was a tumultuous year. Populist causes in Britain and America dealt body blows to liberal values: free trade, free migration, science, reason, facts. Brexit and Donald Trump demonstrated that many people in the UK and US want to reaffirm flag, nation, and Anglo identity.

That famous snapshot taken on this day 48 years ago reminds us that nations may come and go, but the earth is everyone’s home. Many on the right celebrate 2016 as a return to national identity and border walls. Earthrise and the overview effect prove that country, color, and cause don’t mean much when you see the big picture.

What if you could tap your magic slippers together three times, recite a treacly incantation, and everything got better just like that?

This metaphor explains that past 77 years. Really!

Skeptical? I would expect no less.

I know stories work better than statistics, but I’m going to give statistics a go. Let’s compare life in the US in 1939, the year the Wizard of Oz debuted, and 2016. Has life gotten better since then?

My comparison is VERY approximate; if anything, the gaps will be bigger than stated below, so round up. But approximate should be good enough for my purposes.

Life expectancy, 1939: 63 2016: 79

Income per person, 1939: $10,600 2016: $53,350 (inflation adjusted)

Newborn deaths, 1939: 16/1000 2016: 3.6/1000

Child Mortality (0-5), 1939: 61/1000 2016: 6.5/1000

White male/female high school completion, 1939: 24%/28% 2016: 82%/82%

Black male/female high school completion, 1939: 8%/9% 2016: 73%

I could go on about the decrease in crime, violence, teen pregnancies; and the improvements in health, education, civil rights…even animal welfare!

So in 1939 the greatest generation was about to be cast into the crucible of World War II. (Note that since the end of WWII we have had 70 years of increasing peace.) The year that panzers crossed into Poland, back here in America folks had five times less money than people do today. They also completed high school at much lower rates. Note that whites increased their high school completion rate more than threefold, and blacks realized an eightfold increase. For every 4 babies that died in 1939, only one dies today. For every nine children who died between birth and five in 1939, today only one dies. Today people have about 16 extra years to live.

What price would you put on 16 years of life? That should alone convince the skeptic that we’re making progress.

Back to Oz.

So it’s 1939. Let’s run the lines:

World: Oh, will you help me? Can you help me?Henry the Protopian Fairy: You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to make life better and better. You’ll be doing it for the next 77 years and beyond!The Pessimistic Scarecrow: Then why didn’t you tell her the good news before, you evil imperialist industrialist!Henry: I have been. No one’s listening. She didn’t believe me. She had to learn it for herself.Scarecrow: What have you learned, World?World: Well, I—I think that it, that it wasn’t enough just to want to read the papers — if I ever go looking for a better world, I should look at how the world has changed…use facts, not stories. Because it’s there, in the facts. Is that right?Henry: That’s all it is! Life is getting better!Scarecrow: But that’s so easy! I should’ve thought of it for you –Henry: No, she had to find it out for herself. Now tap those magic slippers and watch the world get better!World: Now?Henry: Whenever you wish.